


When Souls Sing

by TheLateNightStoryTeller



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 17:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5936806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLateNightStoryTeller/pseuds/TheLateNightStoryTeller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maveth has Fitz under ITS control. Jemma has to stop him from doing the unthinkable but, even with her leader's voice in her ear, telling for her to take the shot, she decides to take a leap of faith instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Souls Sing

Fitz stares back but he doesn’t see her. There’s nothing of the man she loves in those steel cut blue eyes and yet she knows, without knowing how, that he’s still in there, somewhere, deep down and hidden.

“Please stop this,” she begs. She hears her unshed tears in the rasp of her voice but her eyes are dry for now, the flood still an ache behind them.

If he understands her, he doesn’t let on, returning to work on the device nailed down to the wall. She isn’t an engineer like he is, but she’s read enough and she’s been around him long enough to know that he’s almost finished. When his task is complete he’ll kill all of them, himself, her, the people downstairs, but the thought must not have crossed his mind because her Fitz isn’t a killer, whatever that thing did to him.

Still she can’t let him continue.

She pulls the gun from her side, her hands shaking as she raises it to point the barrel towards him. “S-stop,” she commands.

He glances her way, eyes stopping on the weapon for a few frantic beats of her heart before, disinterested, he returns to work.

Maybe he doesn’t think she’s serious. Maybe he thinks she wont do it, so she points it over his head and fires, ears ringing from the bang that shatters the heavy silence into splinters of glass.

And still he continues. He’s nearly there, just a few more wires to click into place.

“Jemma you need to take the shot.” It’s Coulson’s voice, thick with regret that it had to be her standing there and not him, but the words don’t sound like his. He’d never tell her to do that.

She could try to fight him instead, chance barreling into him in hopes of being able to knock him out, but she knows that won’t work. She’s seen how strong he is now, the power that creature gave him when it chose him as its servant. She’s seen him tear off a solid metal door with his bare hands and she knows she won’t win in a physical confrontation. She also knows wounding him will only slow him down, that his body will keep working until it can’t anymore. She knows what she needs to do.

And yet….

“ _His soul is asleep, but maybe_ you _could sing it awake.”_

They’re the words of a madwoman, an Inhuman who claimed to know of Maveth’s powers but who hadn’t been able to tell them how she knew. Nothing she’d told them makes any sense. It’s nonsense and magic and everything Jemma’s never believed in. The stakes are too high to risk them on a fairy tale.

And yet…

She doesn’t believe in magic but she believes in him. Sleeping souls sung awake are nonsense but her love for him is perfectly clear to her. She doesn’t believe, but she has to try because she’s run out of options that make sense. All she has left is attempting the impossible.

So instead of taking the shot, her arms fall to her side and she starts to sing. Her voice shakes at first, it’s gritty and ugly because she’s too frightened to make it sound like music. She sings him a lullaby, one she knows sent him to sleep as a child, one he sang to her on her second night back from Maveth, when the nightmares came and neither of them could find any other way to chase them from her head. It isn’t lost on her, how strange it is to choose a lullaby to wake him up, but it’s the only thing she trusts she’ll remember the words to right now.

_“I see the moon…. the moon sees me.”_

Fitz pauses, his fingers curling inwards, away from his work.

_“Sh- shining through the leaves of the old oak tree.”_

“Jemma we don’t have time for this.” It’s Coulson again, she’s never heard such regret from him, and part of her knows that having to tell her this is hurting him, but she can’t be distracted now. She needs to _focus,_ so she yanks the ear piece from her ear and crushes it under her foot with a solid stomp.

_“Oh, let the light that shines on me…”_

Fitz turns to her but he’s still a human stone, there’s no recognition in the way he looks at her. He’s _looking at her_ though. He’s stopped.

“ _… shine on the one I love.”_

His eyes meet hers and she tries to hold them, wordlessly pleading with him to come back to her. Her cheeks are soaked now, great salty drops sliding down like streams. If this doesn’t work she isn’t sure she’ll have time to stop him, but she’ll still have to try.

_“Over the mountain, over the seas. Back where my heart is longing to be.”_

It’s a proper song now. She isn’t sure where she’s found the air to make the words into music, but she feels the melody in her throat and chest, feels the words so close to her own heart.

Fitz stands up, taking a step forward. He still doesn’t look like himself but his eyes have morphed from azurite to oceans. Maybe he’s coming to kill her but she doesn’t think so. For the first time in her life she _believes_ in something that she has no reason to believe in. She believes that what she’s doing is working.

_“Oh let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love.”_

He blinks, clearing away the trance he’s been under, and when she smiles at him, he smiles back. She drops the gun and steps forward, arms raising up so she can cradle his face between her hands.

“Jemma?”

It’s quiet and breathless, but it’s loud enough to boom through the universe inside of her, waking her up too, and she raises her head to plant a slow, firm kiss on his lips. Something surges through them, momentarily blurring the lines between where her soul ends and his begins. They’re both singing, the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard and it’s impossible because neither of them are making a sound but she is without a single doubt that it’s real.

When she pulls back, looking at the smiling face of the man she loves, she thinks that she finally believes in curses. More than that though, far more importantly, she believes with every part of her head and her heart that curses can be broken.

/-/-/

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for writing this while watching Song of the Sea, though it doesn't really have anything to do with the movie :P 
> 
> I'm not entirely sure the origins of this song, so I'm not sure how accurate it is that either of them would know it, but it fit with the story and it's the only lullaby I know that doesn't involve telling someone to go to sleep.
> 
> Maybe I am the only person any of this makes sense to? But I am OK with that :P


End file.
